Above "the line" in "A New Kind of Christian"

"[Neo] knelt down on the path, cleared away some fallen leaves, and drew a line in the dust. I stooped down next to him."
"This might help you. Very often,” he explained, “debates in the church occur on this level. There are all kinds of positions on an issue, along this line, with the most extreme positions being here and here.”
I offered a couple of examples: “OK. So Catholics are over here and Protestants over there. Calvinists are over here, and Arminians are over there. And charismatics are here and anticharismatics over there. And we could do the same on the issues of pacifism, inerrancy of the Bible, women in leadership, how the church should seek homosexuals, and—”
“Exactly,” he interrupted. “Now, almost all debate in the church takes place on this line. The issue is where the right point on the line is. So people pick and defend their points. Each person’s point becomes the point in his or her mind. Here’s what I’m suggesting: What if the point defending approach is, pardon the pun, pointless? In other words, what if the position God wants us to take isn’t on that line at all but somewhere up here?” He was moving his hand in a small circle, palm down, about a foot above the line he had drawn in the dust.
“So you’re saying,” I replied, “that we have to transcend the normal level of discourse. that makes sense to me. I mean, Jesus did that sort of thing all the time. Like with the woman at the well in John 4. The big debate is over where people should worship, on this mountain or on that mountain. Jesus doesn’t choose one point or the other; he says that the answer is on this higher level, that what God wants is for us to worship him in spirit and truth, wherever we are. Both mountains are good places to worship, so in that way both sides are right. But where you worship isn’t the point at all, so in that way both sides are wrong.”

in A New Kind of Christian, by Brian McLaren.